The 25p Meal

One of the cheapest ways to pare your food budget right back is to find out what time your local supermarket marks down its perishable products and do your shopping then. This makes possible what we call the 25p meal: feeding a family of four for £1, or under, all ingredients.

Above was a nice meal based around getting an organic unsliced wholemeal loaf for 10p, and adding marg and garlic to make it into garlic bread. Cheap spaghetti (often around 20p for 500g in value ranges) mixed with a tin of kidney beans at 25p and marked down pepper and courgette, both 10p each. Salad was a 10p lettuce with a squirt of lemon juice. There was a LOT of garlic bread made with that one loaf!

A firm favourite now, actually considered a treat in this house, is the meal of pizza bagels, or pittas, or, as pictured below, pizza paninis. Made with 4 Paninis at 19p for 2, then with pizza sauce consisting of an onion fried in a tiny bit of oil, tomato puree, herbs and salt, totalling no more than 10p. They only need a few minutes in the oven or under the grill as the bread bases are already cooked. We paired them with a reduced salad bag at 10p, reduced hummus at 32p and a tub of pasta salad marked down to 26p. Over budget by 6p! If we’d used cheaper bread, such as one pack of bagels reduced to 20p, we would have been under.

It would be cheaper to use the pizzas as a side to homemade soup (see our many soup recipes). Of course, you can add any topping you like to these, but the sauce is delicious in itself.

This next one pushes the budget again, though only by 10p, for a luxury breakfast! It’s porridge (20p worth value range oats) made with water, but with a huge box of blueberries (marked down to 75p) and half a bar of Lidl dark chocolate (bar is 30p, so 15p), smashed up. Yum.

Our local Tesco usually does a big mark down around 6pm. The one in the next town is a little later at 6.45pm and its prices go right down to 2p for many items. Asda starts much earlier in the day with its reductions. Martin Lewis wrote an article on the different supermarkets and their reduction times here.

Unless we’re going to use them that day, we tend to avoid ready chopped things which go off quickly. Whole vegetables and fruit will keep for a few days and bread will be good for a couple of days or can go straight in the freezer. Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve filled our freezer with 10p loaves and buns!

It can be fun to use your imagination and ingenuity to make best use of what’s available on any given day in the reduced section. Please feel free to share your ideas and successes in the comments below 🙂

Ailish Sinclair‘s debut novel, THE MERMAID AND THE BEAR, set in a fictional castle in Aberdeenshire, and featuring the 1597 Aberdeen witchcraft panic, is out Autumn 2019. On Amazon and Waterstones or see Author website for more details.

frugal links

Ailish Sinclair‘s debut novel, THE MERMAID AND THE BEAR, set in a fictional castle in Aberdeenshire, and featuring the 1597 Aberdeen witchcraft panic, is out Autumn 2019. On Amazon and Waterstones or see Author website for more details.

Halogen Ovens are amazing energy saving devices. They cook quickly and need no pre-heating.They often come with lots of accessories; smaller air frying ones start at around £12, larger ones like the pictured model begin at £25.
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Ailish Sinclair‘s debut novel, THE MERMAID AND THE BEAR, set in a fictional castle in Aberdeenshire, and featuring the 1597 Aberdeen witchcraft panic, is out Autumn 2019. On Amazon and Waterstones or see Author website for more details.

How to Grow Your Own Food: A Week-by-week Guide to Wild Life Friendly Fruit and Vegetable Gardening – actually a very good, humorous read too. Full of practical advice for getting the most food out of your garden.
Buy from Amazon.co.uk or Buy from Amazon.com (USA)

More with Less Cook Book - a classic on saving the Earth’s resources and living simply – very thrifty recipes – commisioned by a Mennonite community who live in a similar way to the Amish people.
Buy from Amazon.co.uk or Buy from Amazon.com (USA)

The Tribest personal blender, next best thing to a Vitamix and a fraction of the price! Really useful containers too. Buy from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com

A wonderful British classic of vegetarian cookery containing many very frugal recipes - Crecy Plate Pie is notably very cheap (and delicious), the main ingredients being carrots and onions, those most frugal of veg...
Buy UK or Buy US

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Set in the late sixteenth century, at the height of the Scottish witchcraft accusations, THE MERMAID AND THE BEAR is a story of triumph over evil, hope through adversity, faith in humankind and – above all – love.
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Food for Free - a great guide to Britain’s wild foods – goji berries may cost a bit, but many superfoods are all around us for the taking! A great favourite of ours – detailing wild herbs, berries, greens sea vegetables and fungi. Buy from Amazon.co.uk